1. Field
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate generally to distributed manufacturing scheduling. More particularly, exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a multi-agent system for distributed manufacturing scheduling with Genetic Algorithms and Tabu Search.
2. Description of the Related Art
Planning of manufacturing systems may often involve the resolution of a large amount of varying combinatorial optimization problems. Such planning may have a significant impact on the performance of, for example, manufacturing organizations. Exemplary problems include the sequencing and scheduling problems in manufacturing management, as well as routing, transportation, design layout, and timetabling problems.
Scheduling may be defined as the assignment of time-constrained jobs to time constrained resources within a pre-defined time framework which may represent the complete time horizon of a schedule. A permissible schedule may satisfy a set of constraints imposed on jobs and resources. Accordingly, a scheduling problem may be defined as a decision making process for operations starting and resources to be used. A variety of characteristics and constraints may relate to jobs and a production system. For example, operation processing time, release and due dates, precedence constrains, and resource availability may all affect scheduling decisions.
Classical optimization methods may not be effective enough for the resolution of Job-Shop Scheduling Problems (JSSP).